THEATRE REVIEW

MAY 2026 | Volume 263

 

David French wrote Salt-Water Moon in 1984 as a prequel to the two plays that had made him famous in the early 1970s, Leaving Home and Of the Fields, Lately. Those plays dramatized the Mercer family, Newfoundland expats Jacob and Mary and their two sonsliving in Toronto in the 1950s. Throughout those first plays irascible Jacob teases and baits Mary about her beau back in Newfoundland before she chose Jacob: respectable, well-to-do Jerome McKenzie.

In Salt-Water Moon we’re in rural Newfoundland on a moonlit night in 1926, where “it’s some lovely.” Mary and Jacob are teenagers. She’s in service to a family and engaged to Jerome McKenzie. Jacob is just back from a year in Toronto. He and Mary had been seriously courting before Jacob suddenly left.

A sweet, funny, romantic two-hander, Salt-Water Moon was immensely successful in its day but hasn’t been re-staged in Vancouver, to my knowledge, in decades. Western Gold Theatre, with its mandate to “reflect and illuminate the rich experience of our senior community,” has made the audacious decision to cast senior actors in the roles of the two teenagers. Craig March and Dolores Drake, both originally Newfoundlanders themselves, are nothing short of sensational in Michael Fera’s tender, angry, hilarious Western Gold production.

The tenderness comes from Jacob’s renewed courtship of Mary, his regret at having left her in the lurch, and her reluctant acknowledgment that she still cares for him. She’s angry at his having left without explanation, angry at her circumstances—having to be a servant in another person’s home because, since her father’s death, her mother couldn’t afford to keep her or her sister in their own home. Mary is most angry about her 14-year-old sister’s having to live in an orphanage. She’ll marry Jerome McKenzie to free herself and her sister from their bondage.

And Jacob is bitterly angry about his father’s treatment at the hands of Jerome’s father, wealthy Will McKenzie. Some of the best writing in the play is contained in Jacob’s rants about Will’s humiliation of his father, who had to work for him, and his father’s hardship in the Newfoundland regiment in France where Mary’s father was killed but where Will McKenzie never served because he never enlisted, unlike the other men. (That World War One story will later comprise the fifth play in the Mercer saga, Soldier’s Heart [2002].)

The humour is non-stop. Jacob’s persistence is the engine that drives the play. He remains on the attack no matter how many times Mary scolds him or sends him away. He has the Newfie gift of gab and he’s incorrigible. He mocks; he tells jokes he plays the innocent, the sophisticate and everything in between. Mary not only holds her own but turns the tables on him a few times. March and Drake are both adept comedians, Drake with a thick Newfoundland accent. But both also clearly know that the play’s real stakes lie in the characters’ deep connections and feelings for one another. In a theatrical love story you want the audience to fall in love as well, and we surely do with these two.

Director Fera keeps the action moving on and in front of Sheila White’s simple porch set, basically a riser with a couple of stairs. In the intimate PAL Studio many of the conversations take place within a couple of feet of the audience, the kind of up-close and personal theatre I love. The soft music that cuts in whenever the characters evoke the past felt unnecessary. I also found the set’s backdrop of Coal Harbour high-rises, presumably linking Newfoundland’s past with Vancouver’s present, a bit heavy-handed. Mary and Jacob’s exquisite comic love story speaks eloquently for itself.

 

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